Climb your ribcage too
by Tinhen
Summary: This is how you stay human. Dean post 3.16.


bTitle/b Climb my ribcage toobr

**Title:** Climb my ribcage too

**Characters/Pairing:** Dean

**Genre:** Gen

**Rating: **PG-13

**Word count: **736

**Spoilers/warnings:** Through 3.16, second-person POV

**Summary:** This is how you stay human.

This is how you stay human: you write letters in your head with every little bit of your attention focused on jotting each curve of each letter of each word down and not on the fire or the torture or the blood. Especially not the blood. Christ on a cracker, especially not the blood.

Don't spend time wondering about how there's blood when you're really just a non-corporeal damned soul spinning around in the Hellfire blender. Really, don't even muse about it in those letters you write. Talk about bright things: your car, some girl, every coulda-been that pops into your big, dumb head. Don't talk about the mysteries of Hell. That's how you go crazy, how you forget to remember you're not a demon, how you end up one anyway.

You gotta finish the letters sometimes, just sign off on them with a flourish-y signature twice the size of John Hancock's, but add post-script after post-script until you forget where you started anyway. Then you shove that letter aside and you start a new one, a new Dear Sam, a new Dear Dad, a new Dear Faceless Girl-of-my-Dreams.

Hell, write to Dear Abby once in a while. Ask her for advice on how to hold onto your humanity in the pit. Sign it _Confused and in Hell_.

If you concentrate hard enough on yanking words out of yourself—but not screaming them, you don't want the torturers to hear you, you know—and onto your imaginary page, you can't even really feel your skin tearing like cheap denim. You learn that pretty quick, maybe in your first five minutes and mostly by accident. You were screaming, and then you started thinking. You kept screaming, of course, but you were thinking too.

There's something about eternity that makes you think, and philosophize for pages and pages about the end of things. Maybe that's the demon side of you starting to manifest, but don't worry about that now. After all, you've got eternity.

And you've got company, too. There're billions of others here, and some of them have even figured out your method already. You can hear people sobbing out love letters and notes to children, crying out names in Portuguese, Aramaic, Urdu, English, and something that sounds to you like Klingon.

"It's not so bad. Got a worst sunburn that time in Mohave," you write. "Remember that, how my entire back peeled off and then there were freckles everywhere in the new skin underneath? That was so much worse than this is."

Don't mention how it probably hurts more to have the skin over your abdominal muscles flayed off than your back—more nerve endings and all—because it's not like the people you write to need to know shit like that. Even if they're never going to read what you write them, you gotta write with purpose and discretion.

"Remember that time Dad left us in Beech Forks, and we had to shoot squirrels and shit to eat?" you write, because sometimes it's memories that come to mind. "Remember what it was like to butcher the little shits?"

Don't think too much about skinning squirrels, though. Skinning a person isn't that much different, just bigger and minus the tail and the pelt. A squirrel's glistening and pink underneath its skin, just like you, actually. But don't write about how shiny your fascia is by firelight, because that's just disgusting. Don't think about that at all.

It probably wouldn't hurt to forget to mention that the squish-splat of your intestines hitting the ground after evisceration sounds the same, too, just, you know, louder. So instead just go on about some baseball game you went to at Fenway when you were kids, because Dad saved a guy with season tickets and hell, after Bill Buckner's oops, everybody got a little sick thinking about the Sox for a few years. Write about salting and burning Babe Ruth.

Laugh while you ask "How'd you think the Sox broke the Curse of the Bambino, Sammy-boy?"

Just hold onto your humanity like you would a pen, use it the same way, too, making marks across pages in your mind.

Remember, you're in Hell. This is not _Steel Magnolias_ and you are not Julia Roberts. You have eternity to figure out how to end your letters with some kind of sentiment that doesn't seem squishy and girly. Until then, sign every letter _Dean_.

End.

_written by tinhen Monday, September 8, 2008_


End file.
